Another FAQ!

Much as I love my alma mater, the question “Did your Bryn Mawr education prepare you for your career?” is, I think, actually a bigger one: “Did your liberal arts education prepare you for your career?” Because Bryn Mawr is a liberal arts school, and I think the practical usefulness of the liberal arts is what people are really getting at here.

The short answer: yep, it did.

The long answer: Here’s what a liberal arts education is, and why it’s useful to a translator’s career even though it’s by definition not career-specific.

What is it?

According to dictionary.com, the liberal arts are:

"the academic course of instruction at a college intended 
to provide general knowledge and comprising the arts,
humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences,
as opposed to professional or technical subjects."

That says it pretty well, really, except that you can certainly learn some professional/technical subjects (examples: computer science, education) at a liberal arts school. But the reason to attend a liberal arts school instead of a school or program geared exclusively toward your main subject of interest is to also get that “general knowledge” base consisting of both humanities and sciences as part of your overall education.

How did it help a career as a translator?

There are lots of things the liberal arts can do for people’s lives; one great article comes from a former prison inmate: A Former Drug Dealer Gives A Great Defense Of The Liberal Arts. But you’re looking for what it did for me as a translator specifically. So, here’s a list of skills necessary for a translator that a liberal arts education teaches:

1. Translators need to know just enough about all kinds of topics to understand them when they tried to read more–that’s pretty much exactly what liberal arts educations try to do.
2. Translators need to recognize famous quotes, theories, and principles from disciplines they work in, which you can only do through broad reading.
3. Translators need to understand the way a variety of different people from different walks of life speak and communicate. You can take classes on that very thing within a liberal arts education, or you can take classes on many different kinds of things and hear how others talk about them.
4. Translators need a background in the history of the cultures they work between, and history is a liberal arts staple.
5. Translators need to be experts in their specialties, which can fit into a liberal arts education through majoring & minoring.

Do you have a liberal arts education? What do you feel it’s done for you?